How Do You Feel About That?

You’ve heard of mindshare, the portion of customers’ minds that a vendor’s brand occupies. Mindshare is meaningless; building it is a waste of shareholder capital.

NEWSFLASH: People don’t make cerebral decisions — ESPECIALLY PURCHASE DECISIONS — even in the industrial, technology, military, and commercial sectors.

So, why are you targeting the head, the intellect? Bad move. Target the gut.

Using GutShare™ (not features) to Sell Cars

Martin Cooper, inventor of the cellphone, told Morley Safer of 60 Minutes: “The consumer is king. The consumer ought to make the decisions … certainly not the engineer. Engineers tend to get enchanted by the technology itself.”

Focusing exclusively on logic, technology, and product features — common in the high-tech arena — will result in two undesirable outcomes: 1) failure to tap customers’ real buying motivations and 2) artificially high cost/length of sales.

Fusion Point of Thinking & Feeling

Because mindshare is meaningless, I coined GutShare™ — that portion of customers’ guts that a vendor’s brand occupies — based on these truths:

Every corporate decision embodies at least one of three primal emotions, a factor many tech execs mistakenly dismiss

[On why he was reluctant to split News Corp from 21st Century Fox]: “I guess it was emotional.”

Rupert Murdoch
CEO of 21st Century FoxFortune: 04.28.14

“Late night is not what it used to be during the days of Johnny Carson and even the early days of David Letterman. It was much more of a profit center. The last few years it’s been more about bragging rights.”

Les Moonves
CEO of CBS

“When they’re [venture capitalists] feeling good, they invest more.”

Mark V. Cannice, PhD
Department Chair
Entrepreneurship and Innovation
University of San Francisco School of Management

“Nothing in life is done with one side of the brain. Everything has an emotional content and a pragmatic aspect.”

David Kelley
Founder of IDEOFortune: 04.29.13

Emotional Creatures

Getting the picture? The gut is where decisions happen. Alas, too often, people ignore their guts by overthinking, regretting it afterwards. The gut always has the right answer.